Uber and its former boss won a lawsuit claiming the company hid scandals that led to investors losing billions.

A Irving, Texas-based firefighter pension fund filed class action claims against the ride-hailing company and its ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, but a California judge ruled that the claims should be tossed Friday, Bloomberg reports.

The lawsuit “does not specifically tie any particular misrepresentation by defendants to a decline in Uber’s stock price,” US District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. wrote in his ruling.

It “lumps together” scandals and makes “vague and attenuated connection” to the fall in Uber’s stock, Gilliam noted.

The judge allowed the fund to revise and refile the complaint. It alleged that Uber and Kalanick hide at least six instances of malfeasance while “successfully soliciting billions of dollars in private investment.”

Kalanick stepped down in June 2017 after an independent investigation recommended that changes to senior leadership were needed to mitigate a wave of scandals. He was replaced that August by Dara Khosrowshahi, who has taken a more diplomatic approach to leading the company.

]]>http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/09/03/uber-beats-lawsuit-claiming-its-scandals-led-to-investor-losses/feed/08 DESIGN MISTAKES THAT SPELL DISASTERhttp://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/27/8-design-mistakes-that-spell-disaster/
http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/27/8-design-mistakes-that-spell-disaster/#respondMon, 27 Aug 2018 14:11:02 +0000http://web.sketcharuba.com/?p=361Just like anything else, product design can be done well, and it can be done poorly. When a product is designed well, users don’t notice it. But when a product is designed poorly, users not only notice, but also complain.

In this article, I want to share five the most common things that lead to bad product design.

1. Adding Too Many Features to a Product

All too often designers think about features as a synonymous with value. They believe that the more features they add to the product, the more valuable it adds for the user. As a result, a lot of products are designed with too many unnecessary features which detract from the product’s primary purpose. This effect is known as feature creep—a continuous addition of new product features beyond the original scope.

Here are two tips that will help you avoid this common pitfall:

When designing a product, it’s important to focus on its core value. Identify what’s most important and prioritize it. Cut any feature or content that doesn’t drive towards this value.

Ask ‘why’ instead of ‘how.’ When starting working on a new product, the biggest question should be not how we design a particular feature but why need to design it.

2. Skipping the Prototyping Phase

‘Why we need to create a prototype when we can create a real product and test it on the market?’ By thinking in this way, designers put the maximum effort on creating a high fidelity design that they ship on the market. Unfortunately, after the market release product team often realize that some parts of the design need to be changed. And the cost of the change often will be significant because the team will need to modify the real product, not a paper or digital prototype.

Prototyping helps product teams to test product design prior to market release. Testing can be done with real users. According to the NNGroup, testing with five users identifies 85% of usability problems. That’s why the results of the testing will make it clear whether the design works for users or not.

3. Becoming too Attached to a Design

It’s not that rare when designers fall in love with a design they create. When designers become too attached to design elements, it’s difficult to redesign or get rid of them. It becomes extremely hard to comprehend the critiques—designers start to take it personally. As a result, design decisions become too biased. The effect is known as confirmation bias—when designers search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs.

It is possible to minimize the effect of confirmation bias by inviting designers into user testing sessions. Nothing can be compared with a feeling when you see a real person interact with a product you’ve designed. It helps designers realize that they design for their users, not for themselves. As a result, it becomes much easier to adjust design according to the user needs.

4. Making Assumptions instead of Conducting Proper Research

Almost everybody who designs digital products had a moment when they say “I am a user too, so I know what is good or bad for users.” After that designers come up with assumptions—assumptions about what can make the user live better.

It’s great when designers have personal feelings, but it’s wrong when designers allow personal feelings take over the process. Every design decision, no matter how it was arrived at, still needs to be verified. It’s excellent when design decisions are a result of user research. It’s much better when you clearly understand what your users need and then design based on that.

5. Not Involving Users in the Design Process

No matter whether a team is refining an existing product or designing a brand new product, it’s always essential to harness users in the process of knowledge exploration. Bad design is often a result of not thinking adequately about end users’ needs.

UX practitioners should not only gather knowledge about users, but they also share this information with stakeholders. It will help to create a shared understanding of real user needs.

6. Thinking about Design as a Linear Process

Some product teams believe that product design is a linear process which starts with ideation and ends with a product release. Following this process, they establish a goal at the beginning and strive to ship a product that is designed according to the goal.

In reality, product design is a highly iterative process—to release a product with excellent user experience, designers have to try a lot of different approaches before selecting the one that will be the best for their users. They might even adjust the goal, when they see that it’s required.

7. Not Building a Collaborative Environment

In a team that has a problem with collaboration, designers and developers don’t have a shared understanding of what they want to achieve. As a result, designers and developers stay in their silos.

Focus on creating a close collaboration between design and technical team members. Instead of design and development being sequential, these two activities should go in parallel.

8. Trying to Reinvent the Wheel

‘It’s boring to do something that everyone else is doing.’ With such idea, many designers have a temptation to try and reinvent the wheel — to design something new, something that nobody tried before. But what designers forget is that there are many solutions on the market, and each demands our time. With each product that has different interactions, users need to learn it. In our fast-paced world, users often don’t have to learn how to use a new product.

Before reinventing the wheel, designers have to evaluate the effort required from the users’ side. In most cases, the effort will be significant. As a result, it’s much safer to design familiar—creating a design that will be familiar for the majority of users.

Fireart Studio is a design studio passionate about creating beautiful design for startups & leading brands. We pay special attention to nuances all the time to create professional while cool products that will not only meet all expectations, but exceed them. More articles by Nick Babich

]]>http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/27/8-design-mistakes-that-spell-disaster/feed/0New study finds Google’s Android is sharing even more datahttp://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/23/new-study-finds-googles-android-is-sharing-even-more-data-than-we-thought/
http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/23/new-study-finds-googles-android-is-sharing-even-more-data-than-we-thought/#respondThu, 23 Aug 2018 13:46:42 +0000http://web.sketcharuba.com/?p=354A new study suggests Google is collecting even more data than you may realize, a finding the search giant calls “wildly misleading.”

Google collects all kinds of data on the people who use its services throughout their day, everything from the routes they take to music they listen to, according to a study conducted by Douglas C. Schmidt, a Vanderbilt professor. The study was commissioned by Digital Content Next, a trade group representing digital publishers.

Much of that data is “inferred” through passive means, including location information sent to Google even when people aren’t actively using their Android phones or Chrome Browsers, according to the 55-page study released Tuesday. Both Android and Chrome are made by Google and are the most popular services in their respective classes.

A dormant Android phone running Chrome in the background sent location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or roughly 14 times an hour, according to the study. “At the end of the day, Google identified user interests with remarkable accuracy,” Schmidt wrote in the study.

Asked for comment, Google challenged the findings and suggested the author of the report had a conflict of interest because he served as a witness in a copyright case Google is involved in.

“This report is commissioned by a professional DC lobbyist group, and written by a witness for Oracle in their ongoing copyright litigation with Google,” a Google spokesperson said in an email statement. “So, it’s no surprise that it contains wildly misleading information.”

Google and Oracle have been locked in a roughly $9 billion copyright case over the use of Java software in the Android operating system. In March, a US federal appeals court overturned an earlier decision, finding in favor of Oracle that Google exceeded the principles of fair use when applying Java to its mobile operating system.

Prof. Schmidt didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The study also says Google is able to associate the anonymous data it collects with user accounts through its advertising tools, such as the DoubleClick cookie ID.

Google has been under scrutiny for privacy concerns. Last month, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Google parent company Alphabet questioning how Google collects data through location services, cellular towers, Wi-Fi hotspots and Bluetooth connections, especially when devices are offline or dormant. Google hasn’t responded to the inquiry.

Last week, an Associated Press investigation found that Google services on Android devices and iPhones track and store your location data even if you turn off location history in your privacy settings. Google is now facing a lawsuit over the issue.

]]>http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/23/new-study-finds-googles-android-is-sharing-even-more-data-than-we-thought/feed/0How Torrents Can Benefit Businesses, transfering files through the Internethttp://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/14/how-torrents-can-benefit-businesses/
http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/14/how-torrents-can-benefit-businesses/#respondTue, 14 Aug 2018 17:47:28 +0000http://web.sketcharuba.com/?p=344Torrenting. You’ve heard about it, talked about it, and probably even enjoyed something that came from it without you knowing. But, you’ve probably misunderstood it.

What is Torrenting?

Simply put, Torrenting is a highly efficient way to transfer files through the Internet. This is usually done through a client like BitTorrent.

To torrent, you first download a torrent file from a torrent site. These files come straight from other users (seeders) who are willingly sharing their file to other peers. Once you download the torrent file, you feed it to a client. The client tells you what file you’ve downloaded and where it can be found.

A person looking to download a certain file can directly download it from another person (peer). The more peers that are seeding (sharing the file), the quicker a file can be downloaded and the less burden it will be to the seeders. It’s because of this method of file sharing that makes torrenting such a great way to share files to millions of users across the Internet in so little time.

Herein lies the problem with torrenting. Because people are downloading files directly from other users and not from a single source (official website for the media being downloaded), it makes pirating those files really easy and quick.

This is why, as you may have already heard, torrenting is looked upon with disdain especially by businesses losing profits from potential sales of pirated files.

But, torrenting isn’t all bad. In fact, it has actually helped A LOT of businesses already- even bigger ones like Facebook!

How torrents can benefit businesses

1. You can give your customers JUST what they want

On-demand access has always been a big hit with consumers but the broadcasting industry always seemed to miss this point. They’d only show reruns of popular shows 10 years later.

“In our research with consumers, content-on-demand is the killer app. They like the idea of paying only for what they watch. Currently, the television industry seems to be interested in the potential of this protocol, as their revenues are derived from advertising which can still be employed in internet-based variations, rather than consumer supported content sales. Based on reports from January 26, 2005, almost 10% of traffic on the Internet 2 academic network was carried on the BitTorrent protocol. A recent report announced that due to delays by broadcasters in airing new content, TV program pirating in Australia is rampant, accounting for 15.6% of all torrent traffic.”

This line of thinking gained some traction with other broadcasting companies in the following years. In 2008, the CBC became the first North American public broadcaster to make a full show (Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister) available for download using BitTorrent.

“Yes, Bewkes said, “I have to admit it, I think you’re right.” The much-discussed fantasy series is HBO’s most popular, and “if you go to people who are watching it without subs, it’s a tremendous word-of-mouth thing,” the exec told investors. “We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world,” he said. “That’s better than an Emmy.”

“People often pirate because there’s just no supply for what they demand” is a fact embraced by Warner Bros. already. They’ve even gone on to say that piracy tells them what consumers want:

“Generally speaking, we view piracy as a proxy of consumer demand…Accordingly, enforcement related efforts are balanced with looking at ways to adjust or develop business models to take advantage of that demand by offering fans what they are looking for when they are looking for it.”

2. A quick way to get exposure

If you create creative content like music, films, or videos, but you lack the proper exposure to get your career going, sharing your work on torrent sites is a sure way to get noticed by millions of people quickly.

You might think that “Exposure from pirated work won’t get you anywhere” but you’d be wrong.

In fact, Mystery Science Theater 3000, a TV show that aired from the late 80s to the late 90s remained on the air due to the exposure it had with fans. The fans had taped and shared episodes of the first season as they held true to the show’s credits that said: “keep circulating the tapes”.

This is actually what torrenting was made for. Extremely useful if your company is looking to distribute large quantities of data like Business files, Educational material, Government resources, Massive OS installs, Photograph collections, or Scientific evidence.

By using torrents, your company isn’t only distributing data quickly, you’re also saving a ton of bandwidth.

This form of sharing is so efficient that even Facebook and Twitter use it internally to update their servers.

Torrenting is also a great way to download Linux ISOs which are offered for free and are often 1 GB or more.

Other major open source and free software also encourage BitTorrent as an alternative means to download their products. This is mainly to improve availability and reduce the stress on their own servers.

A word of warning

Downloading files directly from other users comes with its own dangers as well. These dangers come in the form of malware that hackers insert into the files they seed.

Another problem is that your ISP may throttle your connection. This is because ISPs commonly disapprove of torrenting for its relation to pirating- even if you’ve gotten permission from the original source of the file.

]]>http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/14/how-torrents-can-benefit-businesses/feed/09 famous faces on what they love about the webhttp://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/06/9-famous-faces-on-what-they-love-about-the-web/
http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/06/9-famous-faces-on-what-they-love-about-the-web/#respondMon, 06 Aug 2018 18:23:35 +0000http://web.sketcharuba.com/?p=330For the past three decades, the internet and the web have been an empowering force for forging connections, learning, earning, and building global networks. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the power of connectivity. Here’s what some famous faces have to say about it.

“If we spend a certain amount of time on the internet, we have to spend a little proportion of that time defending it.”

– Sir Tim Berners-Lee

]]>http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/08/06/9-famous-faces-on-what-they-love-about-the-web/feed/0GitHub’s Learning Lab launches free courses on OS and HTMLhttp://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/07/30/githubs-learning-lab-launches-free-courses-on-open-source-collaboration-and-html/
http://web.sketcharuba.com/2018/07/30/githubs-learning-lab-launches-free-courses-on-open-source-collaboration-and-html/#respondMon, 30 Jul 2018 14:40:13 +0000http://web.sketcharuba.com/?p=323Earlier this year, GitHub announced Learning Lab — a portion of the site where users can learn the fundamentals of GitHub, and get advice on how to migrate to the service from other platforms.

This was a smart move from GitHub. Learning Lab is growing rapidly, both in terms of users and content, and the company yesterday launched four new courses on the platform.

They’re all fairly self-explanatory. Uploading to GitHub and Migrating to GitHub both talk about the fundamentals of the service, and how you can add a new project, or port over an existing one from a rival service, like BitBucket or GitLab.

The Community Starter Kitcourse introduces users to the settings, files, and documentation you have to add to a project, in order to make it easier for others to contribute.

The only generic, non-GitHub focused course is Introduction to HTML. It makes sense that the site would want to teach these skills to their users though, as a bigger online presence could logically translate to more contributions and downloads of a particular product.

Github’s Learning Lab is a bit like Lynda or Pluralsight, but with a couple of key differences: it’s free, and it’s focused predominantly on GitHub and the ecosystem of technologies surrounding it.

So far, it boasts a decent array of courses, many of which focus on the more advanced elements of GitHub, like managing merge conflicts and building a landing page with GitHub Pages.

You can check it out here. The GitHub Learning Lab is also available via the GitHub Marketplace, which may be the better option for some users, as it can integrate with existing repositories.

Colegio Técnico National (CTN) of Asunción is one of the top schools in Paraguay offering the technical baccalaureate. It was created by the country’s Ministry of Education and Science in 1980. The school is attended by more than 1,500 students from the capital city and from nearby towns like Luque, Fernando de la Mora, San Lorenzo, Lambaré, and Capiatá.

As with most of Paraguayan state schools, the CTN does not have the right infrastructure for an appropriate development of modern education. The little equipment owned by the CTN, donated more than 25 years ago by private or charitable institutions, are today too obsolete. Classes do not have any type of interactive material due to the lack of an Internet connection, equipped laboratories, and modern computers. A new project lead by the Paraguay Chapter and supported by the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programmewill provide the school with Internet access and set up a high-tech electronics lab to ensure a quality environment for the development of innovative solutions based on robotics, automation, e-learning systems, and the Internet of Things. 250 students will be trained in the use of online tools. ReVa , a virtual library, will be available to students and used as a primary reference tool. “Thanks to the Internet we have the opportunity to access information as well as seek help in forums and also learn “C” programming” say some pupils from the school, effusively.

CTN students: Tomas Aquina, Alana Segovia and Juan Velazquez

The project’s aim is to have 450 students in electronics participating with their innovative solutions to national and international competitions. Alana, a young girl wearing a cyber-circuit head t-shirt, explains: “I think that we’ll have more opportunities thanks to the new laboratory. There will be more space for curiosity and inventiveness. It will be very exciting to develop the projects that we present every year to Expotecnia, a fair where each student can showcase their own technological solutions.”

The installation of a network based on IPv6 will facilitate the adoption of new protocols, in addition to teaching administration and Internet infrastructure. 30 teachers will be trained to educate with technological resources. “Teachers are still reporting activities manually, but soon we’ll have a School Management System online”, says Informatics Professor Martha Mojoli, “This project will facilitate us to generate greater interest and higher expectation in students while we are guiding them towards innovative learning objectives.”

Once the project is closed the costs of ISP, computer maintenance, and payment of salaries to technicians and teachers will be paid by the CTN. In addition, the CTN is committed to receive ISOCpy members from universities to work as facilitators and students coaches.

“We believe that the empowerment of our ICT learning will help us to enrich the digital economy in the future. We hope to be snapped up and working as soon as we finish our studies,” one student says, smiling.

Do you have a great idea to make your community better via the Internet? Apply for a Beyond the Net grant, which funds projects up to $30,000 USD.